Recently I decided I would connect my external hard-drive to a PC in my house so that I could access my music over the network as opposed to connecting it to my Macbook everytime I wanted to access music or movies. Lucky for me it’s incredibly easy to share files over the network between Windows and OS X:

Share a folder or a drive in Windows by right clicking > Properties > Sharing > Check Share Folder

On the Mac, open up Finder and click on Go > Connect to Server…

Enter smb://<your windows pc hostname>

Now you can connect to any shared folder on your Windows machine, but how do we make sure it stays mounted? Simply go to Apple > System Preferences > Accounts > Logon Items > Add the shared volume

That was painless. For all tech readers this isn’t because Mac’s rule, its because of the Samba protocol which enables you to network different operating systems. Samba is now a part of Apple, but lets not forget its open-source roots.

appleopolis is an iPhone launcher that lets you add “widgets” to your dashboard. It’s UI is similar to the Home screen and thus visually appealing. The real kicker is that it launches your favorite bookmarks while keeping it real with the iPhone’s user interface. I’ve got Digg and Meebo for sure on my dashboard – what do you have?

I am a completionist – I feel as if all of my contacts need to have full information along with a photo. I found a cool little app called FacebookSync which fills in any blank information in your address book with the information that is provided on Facebook. It uses the Facebook API so don’t worry about getting TOS’ed by Mark Zuckerberg.

PS. This is a MAC only app. Hopefully there will be a Windows and Linux port soon.

I learned that GMail does not like to play friendly with the iPhone. Upon further investigation this is an issue with GMail’s POP3 settings affecting Blackberries, Thunderbird, Outlook, and other POP clients alike.

The Problem

GMail does not use folders to store its e-mails, therefore all e-mails are sitting in the inbox, but are tagged differently. Based on these tags you have your Sent mail, archived, trash etc. The annoying part about this occurs when you use a client whether it be a desktop e-mail application or your mobile device, to POP GMail you end up receiving all of your sent e-mails to your inbox. This is because the client can’t differentiate between GMail’s tags, therefore it thinks it is sitting in the Inbox, which it really is.

The Fix (for the iPhone but will work similarly on other devices/clients)

Create an e-mail address with AOL

Setup Mail Forwarding on your GMail account to the new AOL account

Add an “Other” account on the iPhone

Make sure the Incoming Server is imap.aol.com with your username and password

Make sure the Outgoing Server is smtp.gmail.com with your username and password

Voila, you can now receive e-mails without having to worry about your sent messages showing up in your inbox. Since you are using the GMail SMTP your sent messages are archived in GMail and are fully searchable.

* Some side effects to note – GMail will forward all of your mail, so if you have read it in GMail it will not be marked as read when it goes to AOL, so you may have to read the same message twice if you read it on the GMail web client and on your iPhone.

I recently picked up an iPhone. It’s sexy. However, I’m definitely not going to pay money to create a ringtone out of a song that I already own – sorry Apple, RIAA, AT&T, your mom thats not going to cut it. Lucky for me I discovered a free solution to get ringtones straight to your iPhone, just follow these steps: